You are an M.I.T.-trained mathematician and physicist. How did you come to work on obesity?

In 2004, while on the faculty of the math department at the University of Pittsburgh, I married. My wife is a Johns Hopkins ophthalmologist, and she would not move. So I began looking for work in the Beltway area. Through the grapevine, I heard that the N.I.D.D.K., a branch of the National Institutes of Health, was building up its mathematics laboratory to study obesity. At the time, I knew almost nothing of obesity.

I didn’t even know what a calorie was. I quickly read every scientific paper I could get my hands on.

I could see the facts on the epidemic were quite astounding. Between 1975 and 2005, the average weight of Americans had increased by about 20 pounds. Since the 1970s, the national obesity rate had jumped from around 20 percent to over 30 percent.

New York Times

Apparently, this paper was written by a physicist in response to him receiving a traffic fine. It is said that he was both successful in his defence and received a $400 special prize for the paper

I noticed this in the footnotes of this article – The Crisis of Big Science

In his recent book, The Infinity Puzzle (Basic Books, 2011), Frank Close points out that a mistake of mine was in part responsible for the term “Higgs boson.” In my 1967 paper on the unification of weak and electromagnetic forces, I cited 1964 work by Peter Higgs and two other sets of theorists. This was because they had all explored the mathematics of symmetry-breaking in general theories with force-carrying particles, though they did not apply it to weak and electromagnetic forces. As known since 1961, a typical consequence of theories of symmetry-breaking is the appearance of new particles, as a sort of debris. A specific particle of this general class was predicted in my 1967 paper; this is the Higgs boson now being sought at the LHC .

As to my responsibility for the name “Higgs boson,” because of a mistake in reading the dates on these three earlier papers, I thought that the earliest was the one by Higgs, so in my 1967 paper I cited Higgs first, and have done so since then. Other physicists apparently have followed my lead. But as Close points out, the earliest paper of the three I cited was actually the one by Robert Brout and François Englert. In extenuation of my mistake, I should note that Higgs and Brout and Englert did their work independently and at about the same time, as also did the third group (Gerald Guralnik, C.R. Hagen, and Tom Kibble). But the name “Higgs boson” seems to have stuck. ↩

Shows you that sometimes fame can swing on an error.

IN THE BEGINNING, GOD CREATED DINOSAURS and humans, and they walked together in Texas.

 

Need I say more about the emergence of a new dark age…..

More here – only if you want to be depressed at how dim people can be.

At least, according to many people in Glen Rose.

I am currently reading the excellent Who’s in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain which delves into the nature of consciousness and free will. Like all good cross over science books it can be read by the lay person without much difficulty.

Whilst follow up on a chapter on split brain surgery I came across this nifty little piece .

The interesting thing about neuroscience is the drift it has into philosophy and the nature of free will. This cross pollination comes courtesy of new imagining technology that somewhat disturbingly shows that the body begins to take action before a conscious thought has begun. People are not as in charge as they believe they might be.

And the surprise is?

I have to confess that what I know about farming could be written on a gnats arse with a six inch nail. That taken as a given this doco appealed to me simply because it looks at a serious problem from a different perspective.

Given the modern media’s obsession with foisting absolute cretins on us  who were are supposed to revere in some odd quasi religious manner I thought it might be worthwhile to start the year off with a smart person who is actually doing something. As opposed to being famous for being a dickhead.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — His Ph.D. is in pure mathematics, in a subfield so esoteric and specialized that even if someone gets a great result, it can be appreciated by only a few dozen people in the entire world. But he left that world behind and, with no formal training, entered another: the world of molecular biology, medicine and genomics.

More here -

This is a question I have wanted ot know the answer to for decades. Apparently someone else was thinking about this as well.

Head injury is a leading cause of morbidity and death in both industrialized and developing countries. It is estimated that brain injuries account for 15% of the burden of fatalities and disabilities, and represent the leading cause of death in young adults. Brain injury may be caused by an impact or a sudden change in the linear and/or angular velocity of the head. However, the woodpecker does not experience any head injury at the high speed of 6–7 m/s with a deceleration of 1000 g when it drums a tree trunk. It is still not known how woodpeckers protect their brain from impact injury. In order to investigate this, two synchronous high-speed video systems were used to observe the pecking process, and the force sensor was used to measure the peck force. The mechanical properties and macro/micro morphological structure in woodpecker’s head were investigated using a mechanical testing system and micro-CT scanning. Finite element (FE) models of the woodpecker’s head were established to study the dynamic intracranial responses. The result showed that macro/micro morphology of cranial bone and beak can be recognized as a major contributor to non-impact-injuries. This biomechanical analysis makes it possible to visualize events during woodpecker pecking and may inspire new approaches to prevention and treatment of human head injury.

Original citation here -